Query-based Information Gathering in Intelligent Transportation Systems

One of the roles of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is to collect and disseminate certain information from different locations of the road network. This information can be related to traffic safety (e.g. dangerous situations on the road), to traffic efficiency (e.g. current experienced travel times), or to other information (e.g. parking possibilities) the drivers are interested in. The communication network used for dissemination can be either distributed or centralized or a combination of them. In this paper we focus on optimizing the positions where vehicles along their routes should send query messages in order to collect information about traffic jams. This problem is formulated and solved as an Integer Linear Programming problem. Finally, the numerical results are presented and analyzed.